Forensic Discourse Analysis: Legal Speech Acts in Legal Language

The multidisciplinary analysis of relationship between language and law has been in the spotlight for many linguists in the last two decades. Forensic Linguistics attempts to describe and، where possible، explain the features that distinguish the language used in legal settings from the everyday language. Furthermore، discourse analysis is capable of application in a wide variety of settings and contexts. The purpose of this paper is to outline the theory and practice of forensic discourse analysis as a tool for interpretation and analysis of legal context with a particular focus on legal pragmatics in Persian legal events to enable both researchers in legal system and forensic linguists to pass the level of theory and barge into the practice of discourse analysis in Persian legal system. In this regard، we focused on the Legal Speech Acts based on the theory of Searle J. (1969). A collection of 20 files issued in legal context were analyzed and the results and applications will be discussed.